The Magnificent 7 directors Svetlana and Zoran Popovic write about the film:

The world is in a state of rebeliion against political regimes, against as yet unbridled madness, against itself! In this contemporary, all-encompassing and ever-present ”Everyday Rebellion”, the rebels have uncovered new weapons that make them more active, more efficient, and more – entertaining! From subversive illegal cultural actions in Iran to silent demonstrations in Egypt, through bare-breasted provocations by activists in the Ukraine to the Occupy movement in the US, this film follows pioneers of new forms of protests, from the stages of preparation to their dramatic public staging.

The Riahi brothers manage to skillfully and thoughtfully encompass the entire world in a single gaze and single breath. In a series of dynamic episodes framed by a pointed and witty commentry, this lavish study of a planetary phenomenon pulses in a rhythmic succession of drama, carneval and floating conflicts. This is a story of the power of ideas and the spirit, of a modern-day David who unfailingly takes aim at an unfathomably giant Goliath, hitting his mark with a stone no larger than a grain of wisdom. And here is another reason for us to be particularly interested in seeing this film – one of the protagonists is a Belgrade activist who speaks to events that took place here, setting a precedent for events shaking up the world today.

This film is a festival favorite around the world, particularly of audiences that see in it a magic mirror in which everyone’s face and position is reflected with clarity. One of the largest productions in recent years, a film of undisputable aesthetic value, “Everyday Rebeliion” transcends it’s cinematic form, having become an active internet platform in which all anonymous and “little” people are invited to join in.

Austria, Switzerland, 2013, 110 mins.

http://www.everydayrebellion.net/the-project/

The workshop connected to the Magnificent7 festival in Belgrade attracts more participants than ever. 70 young film students and first time filmmakers have registered to hear about the documentary filmmaking in the presence of the filmmakers, whose work have been shown the night before.

Saturday morning Mahdi Fleifel was the one. His film ”A World not Ours” had been overwhelmingly well received in the cinema and the director, with his own words, ”gave his cv” to the workshop participants. ”A World not Ours” is the first professional work of the director, who right now lives in a suitcase, travelling to festivals with his film – next venue is the Berlinale, where he will present a sequel to ”A World not Ours”. For the Dane, who writes these lines, it was great to hear about Fleifel’s fascination of the documentaries of Jon Bang Carlsen – ”Hotel of the Stars” and the two Irish works ”It’s Now or Never” and ”How to invent Reality”, commissioned by me when I was film consultant at the National Film Board of Denmark (Statens Filmcentral).

Woody Allen is a source of inspiration for the director, who at his office in London has a banner saying ”what would Stanley do” referring to Stanley Kubrick. Fleifel went to NFTS, the National film school in England, and what really pushed him to make the film from the refugee camp was watching Ross McElwee’s ”Shermans March”.

He talked about the technical side of the making of the film, where Danish filmmaker and cameraman Jesper Jargil had given him the necessary advice on what camera to buy for the job.

Sunday night’s film is ”La Maison de la Radio” by French Nicolas Philibert.

http://www.magnificent7festival.org/pages/Program_eng.html 

The Magnificent 7 directors Svetlana and Zoran Popovic write about the film: The great French documentary master Nicolas Philibert takes us into the mysterious world behind the voices and music coming to us through the subtle sphere of sound waves. This is a journey into the heart of the most famous French radio house to discover the secret of a media whose essence is invisible. In the vein of some of his greatest works, this film has a simple narrative frame – this is a saga about a day in the life of radio. A day constructed as an exciting mosaic of scenes from studios, editors’ offices, technical checks, recording sessions, dynamic and passionate speeches, discussions, singing and performance, laughter. Philibert’s assured camera becomes a careful and patient observer documenting the world of radio secrets in mesmerising frames colored by beauty, warmth and an ever-present curiousity.

The titular “La Maison de la radio” is the name by which the French refer to the rotund building in Paris housing the national radio station – Radio France. With the skill of a great filmmaker, Philibert leads us into one of the powerful media fortresses of present-day Europe to reveal to us the ideas, skills, talents, beauty, humor and irony hidden in the labyrinth of hallways, studios and offices.

An extraordinary achievement of contemporary documentary about a medium pushed aside in today’s inflation of images and the visual, but which is staging a comeback everywhere. Like a water-lilly, blossoming under the magic touch of Philibert, the ever-present yet invisible sphere reveals to us it’s face in a spell-binding and unforgettable moment, captivating the viewer.

France, Japan, 2012, 103 mins.

The organisers estimated that 1500 attended the screening of Mahdi Fleifel’s ”A World not Ours” in the big hall of the Sava Centre. The director entered the stage with festival director Zoran Popovic and took a photo that he wants to send to his mother in Denmark, the country in the cold North that his family moved to after leaving the refugee camp Ain el-Helweh in the south of Lebanon. The camp that is the location of his film where he goes back on holidays to meet friends and the part of the family that has remained there, first of all his charismatic 80 year old grandfather. The main character of the film is Abu Eyad, a friend of the director, whose doubt about the way Palestinian politics is being performed becomes the red thread of the warm and humorous story as it unfolds with shootings of today and archive material shot first of all by the father of the director.

The audience included a big group of ambassadors and diplomats from the Arabic countries, headed by the Palestinian Ambassador Mr Mohammed K. M. Nabhan, whose first reaction to the film was ”this is my story”. On the photo that I took on behalf of Mahdi Fleifel the ambassador is the third from the right, Fleifel second from left.

At the dinner I sat next to the brother of the Ambassador, who expressed the wish that the film could be shown in Ramallah as Palestinians living there actually know very little about the many refugee camps. He and his brother, who lives in Sweden for 25 years, told me that they are 7 brothers and 2 sisters, spread all over the world, speaking, if you add it up, 11 languages!

Mahdi Fleifel and his team has started an Academy Award Campaign: Please help us qualify our critically acclaimed documentary for Oscars 2015 consideration. Here is the link to know more:

http://www.aflamnah.com/en/a-world-not-ours-academy-award-campaign/

Tonight the film at the Magnificent7 festival is ”My Fathers, My Mother and Me” – German title ”Meine Keine Familie”, read below.

http://www.magnificent7festival.org/pages/Program_eng.html 

German title: Meine Keine Familie.

The Magnificent 7 directors Svetlana and Zoran Popovic write about the film: Deep inside this film lies hidden a drama which slowly and imperceptibly unfolds enveloping the actors of this family and non-family story. The filmmaker Paul-Julien Robert launches a personal investigation into the identity of his father, but also into his own childhood. A childhood that is far from ordinary – for he was born and raised in a commune, which from the beginning of the 1970s to the late 80s came to be the largest free commune in Europe. It was created by the legendary avantgarde Austrian artist Otto Mühl, and at it’s height it was inhabited with more than 600 people from all over Europe. All of them were drawn there by the ideals of absolute freedom, to live a life based on the principles of “self-expression, communal property, free sexuality, joint labour, collective upbringing of children and direct democracy.”

Within this utopia, among large groups of carefree and joyful children we discover Paul-Julien Robert, thanks to archival footage for which he obtained exclusive permission to show publicly for the first time. This enables him to face a part of his forgotten and repressed childbood memories. The basis of the film is a pain-staking questioning of memory, an analysis of archival images and a dramatic confrontation of the filmmaker first with his own mother, and then a succession of ‘fathers’ and playmates from one of the ‘freest’ kindergardens in Europe.

This film represents an exclusive, shocking and disturbing creation of two dedicated masters of the cinematic art: Paul-Julien Robert, an engaged, courageous, analytical and emotional author and his editor Oliver Neumann, who builds the dramaturgy of this investigation constructing it into a tense drama of extraordinary gradation and rhythm. The two come together to create a film of superior achievement, which, last year in London, won them one of the most prestigous awards in the world of documentary cinema, one that carries the name of the legendary John Grierson.

Austria, 2012, 93 mins.

http://www.meinekeinefamilie.at/

http://www.magnificent7festival.org/pages/Program_eng.html

The morning after the opening of the 10th edition of Magnificent 7 Festival in Belgrade. The sky is clear but the wind outside is close to become a hurricane. A constant sound of wind enters the hotel room and is mixed in my head with the sound of ”Leviathan”, the first film of the 2014 selection, a film that brought an almost physical experience to many of us, who felt like ”being there” (as Richard Leacock always said was his ambition with his films) in this case on board a boat where fish of all kind end their lives, a drama it is, conveyed in a visual language that sometimes takes your mind away from the boat into surrealistic paintings and back again with a sound track that sits in you the whole way through this interpretation of Death. OMG, to be working there… we see the brave men once in a while but otherwise – with the words of Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw: … we can see what the humans see – and get the freaky, hallucinatory sense that we are also seeing what the fish see, what the gulls see, even what the ship sees…

We had dinner at the legendary Madera Restoran where Orson Welles, Hitchcock and De Niro have been eating, talking about the film and preparing for tonight, where “A World not Ours” by Mahdi Fleifel is to be shown. Fleifel grew up in Denmark, went to film school in the UK and has had a well deserved success with this film, that will be seen by a lot of Belgrade Palestinians, who have obtained tickets for the screening.

The 10^th edition – let me show a picture from the first edition’s first film in the festival in 2005, Thomas Riedelsheimer’s “Touch The Sound”.

http://www.magnificent7festival.org/pages/Program_eng.html 

The Magnificent 7 directors Svetlana and Zoran Popovic write about the film: From the moment of it’s appearance, this film and it’s young author received great accolades: a world premiere at the Berlinale, top prizes at leading cinema festivals including Edinburgh, Yamagata and New York and two awards for the leading young talent at Copenhagen Docs and the Nordisk Panorama within the section of “New Nordic Voices”.

Mahdi Fleifel brilliantly interweaves archival images with subjectively filmed material, creating a unique chronicle that manages to highlight the warmth of it’s main protagonists and the liveliness of daily events. Diverse video recordings of events, small and big, over a period of over 20 years are basis for a complexly composed film. This chronicle is an exlusive entry into a space which foreigners are strictly barred from, and so represents a valuable window into previously unseen life inside of one of the largest Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon.

Enchantingly humorous, full of life and indeliblly captured moments, this documentary carries a unique atmosphere and a delicate narrative line, revealing in a surprising light the space and people whose life is stamped with collective tragedy and trauma. In the collision of entertaining and melancholy, the surreal and the absurd, “A World Not Ours” is a testimony to a forgotten dark corner of the world, but also a vindication of life and joy.

A documentary of masterful narration, deeply honest, marked by the personal engagement of it’s maker and a rare artistic achievement – the breaking down of a wall of prejudice and ideologically colored stories about the fate of a people.

UK, Denmark, Lebanon, 2012, 93 mins.

http://nakbafilmworks.gb.net/

The festival in Belgrade opens tonight. I dare write that the hall will look very much like the photo that accompanies this text: hundreds, maybe a thousand spectators, for the opening film ”Leviathan” that the festival directors write about below, a text taken from the website of Magnificent7.

After one year of closing for renewal, we guests stay at Crowne Plaza (former Hotel Intercontinental), which has a direct access to the Sava Centre, where all screenings take place. One film per day is scheduled.

Belgrade weather is nice, cold yes, but with some sunshine this morning and a pretty view to the city covered with snow. A so-called survival kit (oranges, water, snacks, chocolate) stands in front of me at the hotel room. One of the many unique personal elements of a festival that treats its guests as kings and queens.

The coming 7 days will include a small report on filmkommentaren plus the text of the festival directors about the day’s film.

http://www.magnificent7festival.org/pages/Program_eng.html

Directors of Maginificent 7, Svetlana and Zoran Popovic, write about the film that opens the festival tonight:

The first great cinematic hit of a new visual era which is taking over the world. Something you have not seen before! A visual treatment that fully meets the great expectations of a cinematic vision born in the 20th century – a camera freed from the dictates of narration, a new all-seeing eye capable of creating a whole new world from the fragments of the old! “Leviathan” is the film which harkens the new possibilities of the visual in cinema.

The film takes us to the coast of New Bradford in North America, the former world capital of whaling, which served as the inspiration for Melville’s legendary novel “Moby Dick”. Today it remains one of the largest fishing harbours, from which over 500 ships sail each month. Filmmakers Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor follow one of these fishing vessels, sailing out into the murky, black waters on a trawling expedition.

And so begins a “gothic horror documentary! A world we have never seen before! “The most spectacular film of the year!” Such praise is heaped on by film critics fascinated by the artistic achievement of two noted visual artists.

Without a single spoken world, the film creates a Biblical sea beast, the Leviathan, embodied in a gigantic metal monster that thunders by, devouring fish while beseiged by flocks of seagulls. Time and space become foreign to us. An awesome and frightening document of a parallel dark side and at the same time an inner image of our world that is devouring both itself and the planet.

France, UK, USA, 2012, 87 mins.